Vox Chronicles with Mrityunjoy Kumar Jha

We, at Vox Populi Research believe in exploration of various arenas along with expanding our awareness via interacting and getting in touch with experts from varied fields. One similar learning experience happened in June, 2018.

The expert, Mrityunjoy Kumar Jha, is a celebrated Broadcast Journalist with an experience of 28 years in the field. He started his career as a correspondent at News Track; later created a program on Doordarshan named ‘AajTak’, which is now running successfully as a 24*7 news channel. He is currently working as a creative consultant at FM 107.2 Radio Nasha.

The talk with him was a casual interactive session, which started with a discussion on various media houses and their political relations.  He talked about how political parties started to take the help of TV News to present themselves in order to influence the masses - The Propaganda model of Media Control by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky helps us to understand this phenomenon.

The Propaganda model of media control: The Propaganda theory states how propaganda works in mass media.

-         The model tries to explain how the audience is manipulated, and how the social, economic, political attitudes are fashioned in the minds of people through propaganda.

-         According to the theory, media operates as a business which sells its products (readers and subscribers) to other business entities that do their advertisements in media, rather than performing the function of disseminating news for the public. The news is largely being misshaped and reformed from its original form. Herman and Chomsky call the factors which misshape news as filters.

-         The news is being filtered by each of the factors before it reaches its audience or general public.

Another structural relationship of importance is the media companies’ dependence on and ties with the government and political parties. 

The TRP Game: With the advent of new styles of news delivery, there emerged a need for being the best in race, i.e., the race of gaining the highest TRP. This was paid attention to, through the technique of sensationalizing the news content. Labelling a simple argument as an act of out brawl can be one such example.

Gone are the days when informational news segments used to gain attention of the masses. ‘It’s the spice that sells’, says MK. Infotainment is the new trend.

Adventures of Journalism/ Invading Boundaries: Mr. Jha explained the risk-taking aspect of the media houses- be it exploring the jungle with the notorious criminal Veerappan while interviewing him or unravelling the territories of LTTE head Prabhakaran, TV news tries its best to make the information accessible to the masses. ‘Language was the only issue when we met Veerappan’ said MK while sharing his experience of interviewing Veerappan.

Newspapers or News Apps? The Influence of social media outrage: Mr. Jha acquainted us with the position of the newspapers and news channels in the contemporary context and how the social media outrage has changed the way people consume news. News watching as a practice has deteriorated lately. Newspaper reading and watching news on TV is now prevalent just as a ritual that too amongst the older generation.

How are then newspapers surviving in this competitive tech freak market becomes a concern to ponder. To this, Mr. Jha commented that “Regional newspapers are still surviving the market. However, this is not the case with the national newspapers which have been overshadowed by the different news apps. Even though newspapers don’t have the feature for a breaking news notification, it does have a highly localised news section, which I feel, the apps lack. Most of the apps do have a local city section but it generally covers the metros. A lot of people in India prefer reading news in their local language (not only because they don’t know English) but because they are more comfortable with that, even though the news apps are now available in both Hindi and English.” The changing market conditions for various media and newspaper houses was well explained by Mr. Jha as he backed supported the facts by sharing his personal experiences.

Overall, it was a great learning experience for all of us at Vox, accompanied with beer and snacks. Along with the nitty gritties of TV news, we also peeped a little into the fascinating life of a well celebrated broadcasting journalist. As quoted by Peter Senge, founder of the society of Organizational Learning, “A learning organization is an organization that is continually expanding its capacity to create its future.”: We at Vox Populi are on our way to expand continuously beyond the limits!